World War Tree: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Competitive Bird-Watching

Parties. Orgasms. Adventure. Transcendence. Is there a sexier "sport" on planet Earth than birding? Correspondent Mickey Duzyj introduces Pablo to a nemesis, to the GOAT, to Jesus... and to David Attenborough (sorta). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals. No kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:35Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  The North American podcaster. A modern species of extreme abundance. One defined as much by its curiosity as by its tweets.

• 2:00Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 2:07Pablo Torre?

  So this is appearance number four for you, Mickey?

• 2:10Speaker 04

  Fourth time, yeah.

• 2:11Pablo Torre?

  It's no exaggeration to say that you are, perhaps, our most honored and weirdest correspondent.

• 2:18Speaker 04

  I'm gonna make some business cards. That's flattering. Thank you.

• 2:21Pablo Torre?

  I mean, you've allegedly broken the law for us, sawing down a goalpost.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Had to go away after that for a little bit.

• 2:29Pablo Torre?

  You revived your former life as a goth tennis player. Also, you literally shoveled [BLEEP] for us, investigating Nikola Jokic's horse racing obsession. So what have you brought us today?

• 2:42Speaker 04

  So Pablo, we are living in a golden era of side quests. Whether it's learning to get fit, or hiking up a mountain, learning to play a new instrument. This is a real moment where maybe because work-life in 2025 leaves a little bit to be desired, or it just gives us a great excuse to get off of our phones and tablets. All of these pastimes are really booming.

• 3:09Pablo Torre?

  So just preempt what I think you're about to do here. You're staging an intervention for me.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Well, I'm worried about you, Pablo. I mean, we've even reached the point where subjects of yours are tweeting that maybe you need a hobby.

• 3:23Pablo Torre?

  You've also, I think astutely, understood that the best way to get me to do something is to Trojan-horse it in the form of an episode of this show.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  But I need a hobby too. So I've brought a solution, actually, for both of us. It includes plants, which you love.

• 3:41Pablo Torre?

  I do.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  It includes tweeting. And not the tweeting you're kind of thinking, but this kind of tweeting.

• 3:50Pablo Torre?

  Oh, God.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  Pablo, that song that you just heard, that siren song, is the sound of your very own new nemesis bird.

• 4:07Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so to just understand the concept of the nemesis bird, which is stunningly not a thing that PTFO correspondent Mickey Dujie just made up for us, we do need to go back about six months or so. Because Mickey is a very busy and Emmy nominated documentarian and artist and animator whose original illustrations you can see as this episode unfolds over on our YouTube channel. But in a rare bit of free time earlier this year, Mickey found himself at a party. A party that can best be described as...

• 4:43Speaker 04

  Elderly, elderly.

• 4:45Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  And as the subject of hobbies came up, I was doing my usual, "Uh, I don't have a hobby and I could probably use a hobby", yada, yada. And as I was doing that, an older gentleman stepped up through the crowd and he was carrying a bottle of wine and he came over to me, topped off my wine glass and cryptically asked me if I had ever had a nemesis bird. And it was like such a spooky moment because he's staring at me.

• 5:21Pablo Torre?

  At which point Mickey realized that he wasn't at any old, old person party. He was being watched. He was being watched by an increasingly tipsy group of largely bald and very serious bird watchers. The kind of obsessive competitors, in fact, who would argue about records and statistics and asterisks and honor. All of which turns bird watching into something like a sport. And so now I'm visualizing, you know, the binoculars, the bucket hat, the bird watching sort of regalia.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  All that gear, that glorious gear. And collectively, they all kind of flocked together.

• 6:07Pablo Torre?

  As it were.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  And started to tell me that having a nemesis bird is actually the most epic side quest you could ever have.

• 6:16Pablo Torre?

  Because a nemesis bird, it turns out, is a flying Moby Dick.

• 6:23Pablo Torre?

  It is the creature that keeps eluding you. And sure, if you only cared about statistics, you could technically just lie and say that you saw your nemesis bird whenever you wanted. Because bird watching, not unlike pickup basketball, does rest upon a certain code of honor in self-reporting fouls, as it were. But the oddest thrill of the chase itself is kind of the whole point of this hobby in the first place. You may know where this nemesis bird nests, when it migrates, and yet, despite repeated quests to lay eyes on its feathers, it remains a ghost.

• 7:08Pablo Torre?

  Which is a torture felt by birders of all ages, all across the world, as we'll see.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  But sometimes you could still hear it without seeing it, which sounds like it's even more torturous than if you can't see or hear it at all.

• 7:24Pablo Torre?

  So in that case, this bird is not merely ghosting you, but kind of haunting you?

• 7:28Speaker 04

  Yes, that's the best way to put it.

• 7:34Pablo Torre?

  And just to be clear about what you're haunting me with already, that sound is the sound of-

• 7:39Speaker 04

  I'm not going to reveal too much more about your nemesis at this point, because I really want you to come to appreciate the real agony and ecstasy, and even almost spiritual religiosity of this practice of birding. I've previously spent my life considering bird watching probably to be the lamest of all hobbies.

• 8:03Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I feel like a lot of our viewers and listeners may be thinking that very same thing to themselves right now.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Totally. And six months ago, I was right with them, before it was kind of my side quest, outside of, you know, my old person party. And some of these people have traveled the globe to see thousands of birds each. Some have vanished into thin air amidst having a war with other mysterious birders, or else they've spanned decades and continents. Bushwhacking through rainforests, climbing up active volcanoes, just to see their one, single nemesis.

• 8:40Pablo Torre?

  So I should say that I think I actually, at this point in my life, appreciate birdwatching, in theory, more than you used to. I have gone to Central Park, for instance, and stared up at a tree, among other people, looking at Flaco, the now-deceased, escaped Central Park Zoo owl. I've seen red-tailed hawks in Washington Square Park attack squirrels and [BLEEP]. I have been a rubbernecker, if not a watcher. I just didn't realize that today, apparently, I would get, to mix the metaphors here, a personal white whale.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  You will come to appreciate things like this. So this sound...

• 9:26Pablo Torre?

  Which, the more I hear it, feels like a crowd at a baseball game, sort of like, building an applause to root on a pitcher.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  So that sound, Pablo, is actually the mighty tail swish of the ruffed grouse.

• 9:46Pablo Torre?

  Okay, I see you're doing... Okay, we're doing the David Edinburgh thing now.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  And that, Pablo, is actually a close relative of the longtime nemesis of just one of the many birders that I met for you.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  My name is Sharon Steitler, and I'm known online as Birdjick.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  And Sharon described to me the satisfaction of finding your nemesis as being this kind of ecstatic experience.

• 10:13Speaker 05

  So when you do finally see a bird that you've been looking for, it's a dopamine rush. It is a high. I mean, I get this sensation in my chest, and it's up there with, like... Having a 16-year-old scotch or, you know, a really amazing orgasm. I mean, it's just, actually, I kind of describe my perfect day as getting the trifecta of birding, bike riding, and banging. If I can have that, that is a perfect day.

• 10:40Pablo Torre?

  Shout out to Sharon. Shout out to Bird Chick. This, by the way, is the, this is the big, beautiful bill I was hoping for. Birding, bike riding, and banging.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  It's the much better BBB for all the obvious reasons. So Sharon's search for her nemesis bird, the spruce grouse, coincided with a period of time in her life where she was also going through a divorce?

• 11:01Speaker 05

  So, right before the pandemic, my marriage ended and I went a little wild. And some people were talking to me about showing me spruce grouse. And the adult son of a friend of mine was like, Sharon, I'd really like to help you find it. And thinking about the other person, I just said to myself, I was like, I wonder if I just started like offering like, I don't know, blowjobs for a spruce grouse, if that would be a good dating strategy. So I'm just thinking out loud. I'm single now, I don't know what to do.

• 11:33Pablo Torre?

  You know, what I'm finding out today is that somehow the bird watching episode is also the most explicit one we may have done today.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  So Sharon actually gets in so deep that she starts dating a guy who actually has the same nemesis bird as her?

• 11:51Pablo Torre?

  A tale as old as time.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  It's like, okay, the world's falling apart, but we're gonna get a spruce grouse.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  While biking alone in Alaska.

• 12:01Speaker 05

  I see this dark blob in the road moving and swishing its tail. And I just knew, and I gassed and I stopped, and I tried to untangle myself.

• 12:10Speaker 04

  She tries to untangle from her bike. Her bike falls over.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  I'm trying to set up my spotting scope that I had in my bike veneer. And I'm on the ground and I just-

• 12:19Speaker 04

  She manages to take what she calls a crap-tastic video.

• 12:24Speaker 05

  Oh my God, there's a echo wind coming in. Holy [bleep]. Holy [bleep]. Oh my God.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Be cool, Sharon, be cool.

• 12:36Pablo Torre?

  What's funny about that video is that the Blair Witch-style narration belies the absolute focus and clarity that we get on this video, which we're showing on YouTube, by the way, of the bird. You can very cl-- I mean, Mickey, and it is, it's a big, beautiful bird.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  It's presenting, it's swishing its tail feathers.

• 12:52Pablo Torre?

  It has like a red, sort of like, crown deal on top.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  It's really puffed up and strutting its stuff. So Sharon describes this moment almost like seeing a celebrity, like seeing George Clooney.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  Somebody might get super excited seeing George Clooney walk down the street. Might be cool, be cool, don't freak out, because if you freak out, the bird's gonna freak out, and the bird's gonna go away. You wanna stay here and you wanna watch it. You don't want the bird to think you're a weirdo.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  She describes it as a top-five life moment.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  So, just to complete the picture here, here's a photo of Sharon right after seeing the spruce grouse.

• 13:33Pablo Torre?

  So what you see as she's wearing her bike helmet and her sunglasses is her celebrating pumping her fist into the sky, framed by evergreens, as if she just scored the game winner in the World Cup.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Just look at the ecstasy, Pablo.

• 13:47Pablo Torre?

  It is, dare I say, an orgasmic level of satisfaction.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  And, given that, I mean, don't you wish that was you?

• 14:19Pablo Torre?

  So, one big thing that Sir David Edinburgh will not tell you, as much as I love the BBC documentary Planet Earth, is that the world of birding has been shaken by a lot more than merely the tremors of the human orgasm. It has been overwhelmed by technology and electrified by a civil war for its soul.

• 14:45Pablo Torre?

  But before we continue this parade of competitors whose eccentricities will truly rival those of the birds themselves, you should know that in the United States, the bird started going from something to be shot and worn to something to be watched and counted not that long after the actual civil war. Around the late 1800s.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  A much more humane brand of birding emerged. An ornithologist named Florence Bailey wrote a series of books and field guides aimed more towards an amateur audience. And the most famous of these books was a book called Birds Through an Opera Glass.

• 15:28Pablo Torre?

  And an opera glass, for the record, is like a pair of kid's binoculars with a stick.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they're, you know, things that kind of the upper class use when they go to performances.

• 15:38Pablo Torre?

  These are golden.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  But moving from the scope of a rifle to opera glasses brought a totally different enthusiast into the world of birding.

• 15:49Pablo Torre?

  And in 1901, thanks to the work of an enthusiast and ornithologist named Edmund Selles over in England, the term "birdwatching" was hatched.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  He, like other ornithologists, would also kill birds to study them. But then, Dr. Selles had this epiphany. On June 23rd, 1899, at precisely 3:15 in the afternoon, he began to watch a pair of Eurasian night jars. The night jar, as Dr. Selles wrote in issue 699 of The Zoologist, quote, "harmonizes to absolute perfection with the sandy ground, dry sticks, and pieces of fir tree bark, amongst which it so often lays its eggs. I once belonged to this great, poor army of killers. But now that I've watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible."

• 16:49Speaker 04

  So the last century of birding has actually been really, really interesting. What started as just a really scientific study, or just this hobby of rich people, has increasingly become more and more of an everyman's activity.

• 17:03Pablo Torre?

  I mean, it is even popular, it turns out, among your balding friends at that old person party.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And contrary to popular belief, it's not just popular among the hairless, as I discovered when I met the man that they call Birding Jesus. Is it okay if occasionally I call you Jesus as well?

• 17:26Speaker 06

  If you would like to, yes, I have no qualms with that whatsoever.

• 17:30Pablo Torre?

  This is not an exaggeration, if you are not watching on YouTube. This man looks like Jesus if he loved birds and also had a perm.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  So Birding Jesus, AKA Charles Clarkson, is the director of avian research for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, and someone who also runs like a very successful bird touring company. Charles told me that the barrier to entry is so low nowadays that birding, as a hobby even, contributes $300 billion in revenue to the United States.

• 18:07Pablo Torre?

  $300 billion?

• 18:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that over a million people are employed in the American birding industry.

• 18:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, I am inordinately happy to sit and watch one of the most common species for hours just do its thing, so I can better appreciate its behavior, its evolutionary history. And so one of the biggest things for me that brings me great joy is when I go to the tropics, these incredibly specious countries where you've got thousands of species present. To have a client of mine, who's on one of my tours, see these really charismatic, beautiful birds that I've seen thousands of, but to see one right in front of them, and then to see the look on their face, and to hear the "oh my god" that comes out of their mouth when they see this bird, is just such a rewarding and amazing experience to me, that that just,

• 18:57Speaker 06

  you know, it's a kind of a cup overflow of moment for me. My quest is to make sure that I can, prior to my death, captivate as many other people as possible with the beauty of nature and the mystery of humanity.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  So I spoke to a few romantics like this who commented on like the always on quality of birding. So when you're commuting to work, you could be birding. If you're smoking a cigarette on your lunch break back behind the restaurant, you could be birding. One of my spiritual new friends actually called it a quote lifetime scavenger hunt. But there are others. There's, there's a subset of birders who get way more hardcore and competitive about it, keeping elaborate lists on birding apps and trying to stay atop these leaderboards of like, who's got the most birds seen in their life?

• 19:54Pablo Torre?

  So these are the volume shooters?

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Totally. Yeah, total volume shooters. And these people are known as big listers because all of these people will log their life lists, usually on websites or apps. The biggest app is an app out of Cornell called eBird, which is sort of like the Wikipedia meets J-Store for birding. It's moderated by volunteers and also the data is kept for scientific purposes. So, you know, you, you log in, you log your geolocated checklist, and you can be sure that it's safeguarded along with like half a billion other sightings that this digital community has, has pulled together. But you should know that Birding Jesus has a problem with eBird.

• 20:41Speaker 06

  I think it has helped to lower that barrier. But eBird is also largely responsible for the gamification of birding. You know, this is an app that creates leaderboards where people can compare themselves and their bird lists to the lists that other people have submitted. And it does tend to kind of expose that, that dark underbelly of competition where people are acting in their own self-interest and they have this singular mission, which is to best the other competitors.

• 21:09Pablo Torre?

  This is beyond David Annborough now. This is getting, I mean, this is getting a little real according to Birding Jesus.

• 21:15Speaker 04

  You have no idea.

• 21:25Pablo Torre?

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases, like groceries, or merch, or tickets to the game. Plus, it can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted. No matter your team, no matter where you shop, Apple Card is here to help you tackle game day. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 22:36Pablo Torre?

  So, bird watching, very possibly an actual sport. And as I realize now that this is also clearly a story about the humans involved, that I need to know who the [bleep] my nemesis bird is. Who is the official nemesis bird a Pablo Torre finds out?

• 22:55Speaker 04

  Well, I haven't told you because I haven't introduced you yet to the absolute GOAT of birding. The former Senior Inspector for the US State Department. It's this guy named Peter Kastner.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  Does it work better with the reading glasses or not? I would say without, just because it has some shine. Okay. My name is Peter Kastner.

• 23:20Pablo Torre?

  So the greatest bird watcher alive is an actual spy?

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Not a spy, but Inspector Kastner did tell me that-

• 23:28Pablo Torre?

  He's not a spy, but he's an inspector.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  That after 36 years working in the Foreign Service, living in places from Afghanistan to India-

• 23:36Speaker 07

  I was in a fairly high-stress business as a diplomat, and I found that whether I was dealing with a plane crash or visiting an American in jail or talking to a family of a deceased American, getting out in nature was just a wonderful way to disconnect, to refresh, to re-energize my spirit, and just enjoy.

• 24:03Pablo Torre?

  So just as a matter of scouting here, what makes Inspector Kastner the GOAT?

• 24:09Speaker 04

  So Inspector Kastner is the world's preeminent big lister.

• 24:14Speaker 07

  I am kind of crazy about numbers. I have always had a real connection with numbers, and I don't know why. If I'm tuning a radio and the proper volume is at number 13, I'll change it to 15, or 10, or 12, because I can't have it stop on a prime number. It's just not right. It's got to be an even number. It's got to be divisible by 5. 10, I mean, 10 would be perfect. So, I mean, it's just an affliction that I have. But to me, 10,000 is like the ultimate. And it's interesting, because it's resonated a lot in the birding community.

• 24:57Speaker 07

  I think a lot of people see that as not the Holy Grail, but certainly an almost unattainable goal.

• 25:12Pablo Torre?

  10,000? Like, we should just do the math here for a second because how old, Mickey, is Inspector Keesner?

• 25:20Speaker 04

  Inspector Keesner is 72 years old.

• 25:22Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so let me just do some math here, right? So 72, 365, alright. So we're looking at 26,298 days.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  Oh, and also he said that he started birding at four years old.

• 25:36Pablo Torre?

  It's alright, so...

• 25:37Speaker 04

  So take that out.

• 25:38Pablo Torre?

  Excuse me, yeah, 365 times four minus that, okay? Um, taking out 14, 61. Inspector Keesner has spent 24,837 bird watching days on Earth, which means that 10,000, I mean, he's saying that he intends to see a new bird species every other day for the span of his entire life, which seems, needless to say, impossible.

• 26:08Speaker 04

  It does, but you gotta realize that this guy is in the Guinness Book of World Records. He was the first person to see an example of every single bird family in the wild. And he's also like the only recreational birder who's ever discovered an actual new species of bird. He discovered this bird called the Kundina Marka Antpitta in Colombia.

• 26:37Pablo Torre?

  What is the all-time scoring list? What does that ranking actually look like?

• 26:41Speaker 04

  So you should know that a life list that is over 8,000 species is considered like insane. There's a list with only 32 people on it that have ever gotten that number. And only 10 people all-time have ever had lists over 9,000.

• 26:59Pablo Torre?

  And so the all-time record is what then?

• 27:02Speaker 04

  So it was thought before Inspector Keesner came along that the all-time long list record belonged to this British-Canadian guy named Philip Rostron. He's got a list that has 9,763 on it. And Inspector Keesner was climbing the list through eBird, which again is the Wikipedia of bird watching.

• 27:23Pablo Torre?

  Meet Jay Store.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  With the community of scientists who are monitoring, you know, the progress. But the inspector also used a separate website called Igo Terra, which is kind of more of like IMDb.

• 27:37Pablo Torre?

  Which is a less academic fact checking.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  There's more species available. So Inspector Kaisner, he made a pretty big deal out of it in the birding community.

• 27:46Speaker 07

  I had it all planned out. I was going to do it. My 10,000th bird was going to be a wonderful thing called a tufted puffin.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  Which he would get on US soil.

• 27:55Speaker 07

  And Oregon, standing on US soil. I mean, this is going to be the best.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  After going to 195 countries and territories.

• 28:03Speaker 07

  And then all of a sudden.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  Then came along Dr. Jason Bourne. I mean. I mean, Dr. Jason Mann. Jason Mann.

• 28:16Speaker 07

  This Jason Mann shows up and he's almost behind me.

• 28:19Pablo Torre?

  Who the [bleep] is Dr. Jason Mann?

• 28:22Speaker 04

  So Dr. Mann, as far as I can tell, is an American healthcare investor who's, who's living abroad in Hong Kong. And he'd been logging his bird sightings on this other, less popular birding website called surfbirds.com. So out of nowhere, Dr. Mann's list pops up on Igo Terra, which is like a legit site. And where Inspector Kaisner had been climbing gradually the leaderboard, past the 9,000 mark. When Dr. Mann shows up, suddenly he's right there and he's got over 9,000 as well.

• 29:02Pablo Torre?

  So what you're telling me is that this is the real life Dragon Ball Z meme in which a guy has a power meter and he's saying, "It's over 9,000."

• 29:11Speaker 08

  It's over 9,000! What, 9,000?

• 29:16Pablo Torre?

  That is literally what's happening now.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  And I, the race was out.

• 29:25Speaker 07

  I became aware that Jason Mann had moved his list to Igotera. And that he was only 50 birds behind me. I said, holy moly, this guy has caught up 300 birds in three months. That's, that's a little unusual. So since I had put my plans out there, I snuck off to Taiwan and I really, absolutely snuck off. I didn't tell anybody I was going, except for one guy. In fact, I, and I really, I'm not sure I should say this in public, but I kept birding in eBird as if I was in my backyard while I was in

• 30:08Speaker 07

  Taiwan. I have, I have a streak of like 7,000, 8,000 days in a row that I've done eBird checklists and people actually follow me and they say, oh yeah, well I see, see you're eBirding in, in Florida or I see you're eBirding in Malaysia, whatever. So I kept eBirding in my backyard. And I didn't put the birds in, in Taiwan until I left Taiwan and then I erased all the erroneous data and replaced it with the Taiwan data because I didn't want anybody to know I was there.

• 30:43Pablo Torre?

  Try not to read between the lines of Inspector Kastner. He's alleging that something nefarious, something maybe a little dishonest, maybe afoot.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  I mean, the race to 10,000 at this point goes full cloak and dagger with each man crisscrossing the globe in this high stakes pursuit to reach the finish line first.

• 31:05Pablo Torre?

  Right. Now I have Maguire and Sosa. Now I have the two of them like barnstorming around the world, competing, keeping up with each other.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  In this world, it was that big. So Dr. Mann is in Colombia where there are tons of species of birds. So Dr. Mann takes the lead when he's there in Colombia. Inspector Kastner sees this. He decides to go from Taiwan to the Philippines.

• 31:28Pablo Torre?

  Well, hello, Inspector Kastner.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  And then on February 9th, 2024.

• 31:35Speaker 07

  I just posted a photograph of myself in the back of my camera showing the, the orange tufted spider hunter with a little sign saying 10,000. And that was it.

• 31:49Pablo Torre?

  So this is where birding, big listing becomes actual sports. He's doing the Wilt Chamberlain thing.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 31:57Pablo Torre?

  He has his big round number.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  And he looks so happy in the photo, too. So the inspector posts these photos everywhere. He puts them on iGoterra, he posts on eBird, he posts on Facebook. This is top moment for him. And it seems like Inspector Kaisner has won this epic race.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  But then it actually comes out that Dr. Mann had actually done his own post just 12 hours before.

• 32:29Pablo Torre?

  12 hours?

• 32:31Speaker 04

  Claiming that actually he was the first to 10,000.

• 32:37Pablo Torre?

  My god. So Dr. Mann's production values here seem to be even greater than Inspector Kaisner. Because he has, he has a graphically edited, like, digital medallion he's given himself in gold, where it says 10K and then has lifetime birds underneath. Is that fake? Did he put fake confetti, like, golden confetti? He's like sweaty in a jungle, but he's like superimposed confetti? And it says, "New world record, Jason Mann," and has a little illustrated bird on the side.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  This is his trophy for the world.

• 33:12Pablo Torre?

  And the reaction is what?

• 33:15Speaker 04

  So Inspector Kaisner says that with these things happening at the same time.

• 33:19Speaker 07

  After, you know, a lifetime of nobody ever coming close to 10,000, and two people doing it and claiming it on the same day is just nuts. And the, the, the birding world exploded, it really did.

• 33:34Pablo Torre?

  It's a little suspicious. Dr. Mann, is, is he, is he legit? Like, what, what do you, what do you think? What do you know?

• 33:42Speaker 04

  So Dr. Mann did not respond to many texts and emails that we sent him over the last few months. And he keeps like a very low profile online. He even took down a bunch of his LinkedIn profile after we initially reached out to him.

• 33:58Pablo Torre?

  So I'm now just like, I'm doing some, some just cursory research into Dr. Mann. And there's this thread on, on birdforum.net. It's, it's a comment thread. And the quote. I think says what many viewers and listeners might be thinking. Quote, "Either this guy is the luckiest birder alive, having rediscovered several lost species, or his list is not to be trusted," end quote.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, so a lot of the species that Dr. Mann had on his Igoterra list did raise eyebrows. Inspector Kaisner said that it would be headline news, for example, to see or hear a bird as rare as the New Caledonian Nightjar. You'll remember

• 34:47Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  From the great epiphany of 1899 in issue 699 of The Zoologist, "The Song of the Nightjar."

• 34:58Speaker 04

  But this is no ordinary nightjar, Pablo. The New Caledonian Nightjar has not been seen on Earth since 1939.

• 35:07Pablo Torre?

  Which is all to say, I suppose, that if you had in fact found such a nightjar, you would not bury it on your list. You'd be shouting this from the rooftops.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Or treetops, for sure.

• 35:20Pablo Torre?

  I'm looking at just the other pages available to me on birdforum.net. And here's the quote from one of the pages. "Jason Mann reports several dozen extremely fishy species that, besides him, no one has claimed to have seen for decades. Some occur only in war regions, on islands that can only be visited by scientists, on remote mountains that can only be accessed via helicopter. These include the following near-m mythical species: The bare-legged swiftlet. The buff-breasted saberwing.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  The buff-breasted buttonquail.

• 35:58Pablo Torre?

  The scaled flowerpiercer.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  The Sula waysee woodcock.

• 36:03Pablo Torre?

  The papuan whipbird.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  The taliboo bushwarbler.

• 36:08Pablo Torre?

  The Kangian titbabbler.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  The black-throat, of course.

• 36:13Pablo Torre?

  This now is like an NC-17 rated bird watching episode.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  Oh, and we haven't even gotten to a very important birding term.

• 36:24Pablo Torre?

  What term have we somehow not gotten to yet?

• 36:27Speaker 04

  That's jizz, Pablo.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 37:18Pablo Torre?

  So I should disclose that you got me.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:22Pablo Torre?

  I'm hooked. I think that's very clear to everybody now. I am ready to start collecting some nice, big, round numbers on one of these many apps available to me.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  So we all know that you get your ecstasy from competition. But let's recall that before we got distracted by the dirty birding names here, that our friend Charles-

• 37:43Pablo Torre?

  Birding Jesus.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Right, Birding Jesus. Mentioned that big listers actually represent the dark underbelly of birding and kind of like the gamification of what should be a spiritual experience. So I got Charles to talk about this race to 10,000, and Jesus got angry Pablo.

• 38:04Speaker 06

  I can't fathom the idea of spending large sums of time and money to go to some faraway location only to zoom around the country in a very short period of time, jumping in and out of cars just to see one bird, check it off a list, get back in the car and drive to another location. There's nothing else that, for me personally, is as impressive as the lords of the air flying all over our planet. And so they've always been a source of my motivation. And in many ways, they are a pretty consistent source of my happiness, viewing them as a source of competition, even on a personal level. So you try to set a goal of seeing X number of species. And to me, that's the antithesis of why I love birds.

• 38:49Pablo Torre?

  The lords of the air being the birds and not the people.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  So, consider the nemesis bird, Pablo. It's not about finding it or not, even though it seems to be. It's really about the search, investigating, interrogating, noticing things, being out of cellphone service, to not be immersed in cyberspace, but actually be immersed in reality. And after doing that, you can witness these like small majestic miracles. So, I mean, you're probably tweeting right now?

• 39:25Pablo Torre?

  I have multiple tabs open, for the record.

• 39:30Speaker 04

  But to hear Jesus tell it, for a bird watcher to actually successfully find their personal nemesis bird, you almost have to put yourself in like a sensory deprivation chamber for your soul.

• 39:46Pablo Torre?

  Okay, I'm closing, closing my other tabs.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  So, birding Jesus's longtime nemesis bird was the Rufus Ventid ground cuckoo, which is known as the ghost of the forest for being really one of the most elusive birds on earth. They spend their time chasing ant swarms through the jungles of Panama and Colombia. And there are all sorts of birds and other organisms that use them as a food source. So, after 30 trips down to the jungle over, you know, 10 years, as Charles was walking by himself through the jungle, he heard the call of an oscillated antbird.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  He refers to this call as the holy grail of antbird calls, because those birds only really hang around the most massive ant swarms.

• 40:43Speaker 06

  And so, you know, my heart rate went up. And the swarm seemed to be a few hundred meters off the trail. So I plunged headlong, bushwhacking into the rainforest, as I typically do. As I transitioned from this very high light environment, I had to let my eyes adjust to this low light environment. I started seeing more and more birds. I had to see wood creepers. I would see flycatchers. There were toucans on the ground, mott mott's in the trees, ant birds. And they were all kind of profiting from this army ant swarm, which was absolutely massive. And it just sounded like it was pouring rain because of all of the ants kind of scouring through the leaf litter.

• 41:21Speaker 06

  And as I was kind of surveying the scene, I saw this blur of this bird that just disappeared over the hilltop. And based on its jizz, which is a birding term that refers to general impression of shape and size, everything about this bird screamed Rufus Bennett ground cuckoo. So my heart absolutely stopped.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  And yes, in case you were wondering, Jesus wept.

• 41:46Speaker 06

  Yes, well, yes, I did have tears in my eyes. It wasn't a nemesis bird of mine because it was a bird I wanted to check off a list. I was just absolutely captivated, enamored, fascinated by this group of birds that have evolved this incredibly unique lifestyle. This one individual would then choose to spend an hour and a half in close proximity to a human was just, I felt, a very special experience. So after a while, I called my wife and I whispered to her as I was kind of sobbing, you know, I found my bird. I'm staring at a Rufus Bennett ground cuckoo right now. It's just a few hundred feet away from me.

• 42:28Speaker 06

  To which she responded, "That is so wonderful. I'm so happy for you. I'm going into Home Depot. I'll call you later."

• 42:37Speaker 04

  So the question now, Pablo, is, uh, are you a believer?

• 42:41Pablo Torre?

  I could not be, yeah, more, more subscribed to the religiosity that you have brought me here.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  All right, so I asked Birding Jesus Himself to help us choose the official Pablo Torre finds out nemesis bird, and He had looked at some charts and lists on your behalf. He considered a couple of wood warblers for you, like the oven bird. Charles also liked a bird called the American redstart, has big orange spots. But we thought maybe that was a little, little too Trumpy for Morning Joe Pablo.

• 43:16Pablo Torre?

  Fair.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  But, but then Birding Jesus settled on your nemesis, which is the northern perula.

• 43:24Pablo Torre?

  The northern perula?

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Beautiful bird, pretty, pretty small bird.

• 43:29Pablo Torre?

  A beautiful yellow-bellied.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  That's technically called its bib, Pablo.

• 43:35Pablo Torre?

  Its bib, all right, noted.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  They tend to live in the Caribbean, uh, but they fly up to eastern North America to nest at this time of year, which is migration season.

• 43:45Pablo Torre?

  Its song, can we play that one more time?

• 43:49Speaker 04

  So Charles told me that the song of the northern perula is, is actually so high pitched that, that people that start to lose their hearing, they lose the ability to detect your nemesis bird's song.

• 44:01Pablo Torre?

  Which feels like a bit of a metaphor that I am unable to currently translate fully.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  It's a young man's bird, Pablo.

• 44:07Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  A thinking man's bird.

• 44:10Pablo Torre?

  And so, uh, what do I do? What do we do?

• 44:14Speaker 04

  So Charles told me that of all places, the birding Mecca is really Central Park.

• 44:19Pablo Torre?

  We're going to go to Central Park now. You, you want to take me to Central Park?

• 44:23Speaker 04

  We're, we're going. I mean, let me just ask you this, what other kind of reporting could deliver a transcendent orgasmic moment of joy? And Pablo, Jesus has risen. Please meet Birding Jesus.

• 44:46Speaker 04

  Hello? There he is. How are you?

• 44:51Pablo Torre?

  Um, what the [bleep] is happening?

• 45:14Pablo Torre?

  So if you're not watching on our YouTube channel right now, what is happening is that we are being called to gather our gear by birding Jesus.

• 45:23Speaker 06

  My wife is Catholic. She hates that you guys are calling me this.

• 45:28Speaker 06

  She's something more Catholic than Harrison.

• 45:31Pablo Torre?

  And so we followed him out of our studio and toward the elevator here at Metalark Media. It doesn't occur to me that Metalark is named after a bird.

• 45:40Speaker 06

  It is one of the most imperiled birds in all of North America.

• 45:43Pablo Torre?

  Really?

• 45:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, 75% of the entire population's disappeared since 1956.

• 45:47Pablo Torre?

  Oh, that's amazing. And what's the...

• 45:49Speaker 06

  It's a grassland.

• 45:50Pablo Torre?

  And it turned out that I had a lot of questions for our guide, whose government name, once again, is Charles Clarkson, about New York City's whole birding ecosystem. What's your sense of like a red-tailed hawk eating a rat?

• 46:07Pablo Torre?

  As we began descending into the subway, I couldn't help but feel this burning desire, a deep, almost primordial urge to turn this episode into a nature documentary.

• 46:24Pablo Torre?

  And yes, to hire David Attenborough.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Ah, the North American podcaster. A modern species of extreme abundance. One defined as much by its curiosity as by its tweets.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  An exotic subspecies, however, known as the Filipino American podcaster, or FAP for short, has become increasingly difficult to find outside of the studio and out in the wild.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  But all of that changes

• 47:12Speaker 03

  as we land on Planet Pablo.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  This afternoon, the podcaster has camouflaged himself, swapping out the trademark blue cardigan of the species for the cheap blue vest of the common birder.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Our rare sighting begins during spring migration outside the American Museum of Natural History.

• 47:50Pablo Torre?

  You see that? So we have the pigeons with a hawk or a penguin eagle behind it. So...

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Before long, the podcaster ventures into Central Park, also known as the Madison Square Garden of birdwatching, a veritable mecca, even if one of its most colorful residents is a Baltimore Oriole.

• 48:21Pablo Torre?

  I guess it makes sense for a show that is definitely a sports show to see the mascot of an actual sports team.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  The obsessive Filipino-American podcaster travels in a flock, most often with an extraordinarily endangered breed, the freelance reporter.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  When you said that the parala might be watching us, I thought about predator.

• 48:53Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  You know, hiding in the...

• 48:55Pablo Torre?

  Lathered in mud.

• 48:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:57Pablo Torre?

  That's what we gotta do. We are doing that, technically.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  And on this day, they are guided by a true wonder of nature, indeed, a mythological creature who simply goes by the name of Birding Jesus.

• 49:16Speaker 06

  So, American robins are singing. Yeah, we've got some vocal activity. American robins are singing.

• 49:21Pablo Torre?

  I just love that I'm just gonna... I just point to my ear and suddenly birding Jesus is like, "That's an American robin."

• 49:26Speaker 03

  The podcaster is jubilant.

• 49:29Pablo Torre?

  This is a great friend to have.

• 49:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, everybody needs a birding friend, I think.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Suddenly, the freelance reporter sniffs out a lead.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  So you were saying that kind of the migration period is wider.

• 49:42Speaker 06

  Most of the time, males arrive on territory prior to females so that they can compete with one another for access to a territory.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  But the obsessive fap, having become perhaps unaccustomed to the great outdoors...

• 49:56Speaker 06

  ...provide the pending females with all the resources they need to build a nest.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Seems on this day to have become particularly distracted.

• 50:06Speaker 06

  And then assess the quality of the male based on the territory he was able to procure.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  Show me what you got.

• 50:10Speaker 06

  Exactly, so...

• 50:11Pablo Torre?

  Pending females is also a good band name, by the way.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  The podcaster, hungrier than ever for content and thirsty as they come, seeks his prey.

• 50:21Pablo Torre?

  The name of my nemesis bird is...

• 50:25Speaker 04

  The northern perilla.

• 50:26Speaker 06

  The northern perilla, that's correct.

• 50:27Pablo Torre?

  The northern perilla.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  So driven is he by the algorithm...

• 50:32Speaker 06

  Last year, there was one documented right here in the ramble. So we are still within the realm of possibilities of finding a northern perilla.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  But the podcaster will stop at nothing.

• 50:44Pablo Torre?

  We will find them.

• 50:45Speaker 06

  We will.

• 50:46Pablo Torre?

  Wherever they may be hiding.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  Even...

• 50:48Speaker 06

  The caveat here is they, you know, they weigh as little as five grams.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  And especially at the incontrovertibility...

• 50:57Speaker 06

  And pick out the movements of birds that are moving around in a canopy that's being pelted with rain.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Of the elements.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  Nobody said this question was gonna be easy.

• 51:07Speaker 06

  That's right, and it shouldn't be. This is a nemesis bird.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Nothing can stop the podcaster...

• 51:12Pablo Torre?

  But here's the thing about a nemesis bird.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  And his very own brand...

• 51:16Pablo Torre?

  We have not seen the nemesis bird yet.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  ...of climax.

• 51:19Pablo Torre?

  But the nemesis bird also hasn't seen us.

• 51:27Speaker 06

  Canada goose.

• 51:28Pablo Torre?

  Canada goose.

• 51:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, Canada goose.

• 51:30Pablo Torre?

  Canada goose.

• 51:31Speaker 04

  Wait, the jacket or the bird?

• 51:33Speaker 06

  There's a northern cardinal making a chip note behind us.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Over here.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  You're hearing far more than you're seeing. So boning up on the vocalizations of birds is an absolute essential aspect of data collection or bird watching in general.

• 51:49Pablo Torre?

  I've been stunned by the amount of boning that goes on in the bird watching community in general.

• 51:56Speaker 06

  I'm sure, yeah. It's a randy sport.

• 52:02Pablo Torre?

  It is a romantic.

• 52:05Speaker 06

  Pastime?

• 52:06Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, and even like the rain, the wet, the wetness.

• 52:11Speaker 03

  The podcaster is distracted.

• 52:14Pablo Torre?

  The clouds sort of shrouding, hiding, but also revealing.

• 52:17Speaker 06

  It's very beautiful.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  Which is precisely the point.

• 52:21Pablo Torre?

  As if it's pulling up a stocking on the skyscrapers of New York.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Of bird watching.

• 52:28Pablo Torre?

  Beginning to get it.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:29Pablo Torre?

  Kind of beginning to get it.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Instead of podcasting.

• 52:38Pablo Torre?

  I've greatly enjoyed this, even though we have come up very empty and very wet.

• 52:46Pablo Torre?

  The northern parilla has evaded us, but I don't want to give up yet.

• 52:52Speaker 06

  Good, and you shouldn't.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  It has been, as the Filipino-American podcaster himself might say, "An exclusive skeleton key for a time machine into the Kremlinology of what you might call the last American monoculture, with nothing less at stake than the very nature of nature itself."

• 53:18Pablo Torre?

  What I've found out is that even though I've gained a nemesis, I've also gained a friend.

• 53:25Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 53:26Pablo Torre?

  Thank you for inviting us.

• 53:27Speaker 06

  You're very welcome. I'm so happy that I could facilitate this very wet day in the park.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  Before we go, though, I have a very New York City way of us continuing our quest. I've put together a series of flyers.

• 53:42Pablo Torre?

  Have you seen this bird with a black and white photo of the northern parilla?

• 53:47Speaker 04

  So I think we should hang it up.

• 53:49Pablo Torre?

  Oh, and you have the tear-away tags at the bottom. 513-85-PABLO, that is actually our hotline.

• 53:55Speaker 04

  Put that up like that?

• 53:57Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:00Pablo Torre?

  513-85-PABLO, the northern kingbird, need not apply.

• 54:06Pablo Torre?

  We're coming for you.

• 54:09Pablo Torre?

  Emphasis on coming.

• 54:15Pablo Torre?

  Is that too much?

• 54:19Pablo Torre?

  Is that a little much? No comment. It's your show.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  But first, Pearl Jam. Sorry, is this... have I got the wrong program? Slightly confused.

• 54:45Pablo Torre?

  And that, for the record, was not the real David Attenborough. It was actually some guy named Guy. And you can find Guy over on cameo.com/voiceoverguyuk. But this has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark Media production, aimed after one of the most imperiled birds in all of North America. And we will hopefully talk to you next time.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a health care plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals. No kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.